Expanse alex death3/16/2023 Just before sunrise, I drove into the park. Restaurants are running out of food, having to get supplies from Pahrump or Vegas.” “This thing with the flowers, it’s crazy,” the man on night duty said. In early March, when the bloom was at its height, I drove from Los Angeles to Beatty, Nevada, northeast of the park, and checked in at a Motel 6. No mania in the bizarre history of Death Valley-the prospectors and swindlers of the late nineteenth century the playboy adventurers and car racers of the Jazz Age the psychedelic goings on in the sixties and seventies, including a residency by the Manson family-matched the Superbloom invasion. In March alone, more than two hundred thousand people came through. The park usually receives about a million visitors each year. Park rangers had predicted an exceptional flowering after the October storms, but they were unprepared for the intensity of the public response. In a flashback to the Ice Age, when a lake filled the valley, a shallow body of water covered the basin for several weeks.īecause of the rain, Death Valley experienced what came to be called the Superbloom: cascades of wildflowers across thousands of acres. The deluge tore up roads and carried Dumpsters for miles. Geological Survey called a “thousand-year-flood event.” At Scotty’s Castle, a Mission Revival villa that an eccentric millionaire built in the north of the park in the nineteen-twenties, three inches of rain fell in five hours. The shadow lifted in October of last year, when several storms struck Death Valley National Park, resulting in what the U.S. Some meteorologists doubt that measurement, but even without it Death Valley would remain one of the hottest places on Earth. In 1913, a weather observer reported a temperature of a hundred and thirty-four degrees-still the official world record. In summer, nothing stands in the way of extreme heat. Whatever rain gets in tends to evaporate as it descends to the sunken bottom. The dryness of the region is compounded by the depression of the valley floor-as low as two hundred and eighty-two feet below sea level. Any system that can carry water across those barriers is a freak occurrence. Close by are the jagged Panamints, which reach eleven thousand feet. Eighty miles to the west is the Sierra Nevada range, the highest in the contiguous forty-eight states, rising to fourteen thousand five hundred feet. Photograph by Jim Manganĭeath Valley, the majestically desolate national park on the eastern edge of California, is a rain-shadow desert, meaning that nearby mountain ranges drain moisture from incoming weather systems and stop rain from reaching the other side. In the spring, the valley shimmered with myriad points of color, as if Georges Seurat had touched up a Georgia O’Keeffe.
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